American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders

Eli Washington Caruthers's unpublished manuscript, American Slavery and the Immediate Duty of Southern Slaveholders, is the arresting and authentic alternative to the nineteenth-century hermeneutics that supported slavery. On the basis of Exodus 10:3--"Let my people go that they may serve me"--Caruthers argued that God was acting in history against all slavery. Unlike arguments guided largely by the New Testament, Caruthers believed the Exodus text was a privileged passage to which all thinking